Kellerman: Campbell Rhodes
Transcript of TV interview program Kellerman, hosted by Nathan Kellerman, aired on GBC-TV on Monday, 4 August, 2008. '''Guest: Campbell Rhodes NK: My guest tonight was Prime Minister of Georgeland for nearly ten years and at the time was one of the youngest political leaders in the world. He has since served as an ambassador and a presidential candidate, and has also become a blossoming author and commentator. Can you rehabilitate yourself from politics? Let's find out. Ladies and gentlemen, Campbell Rhodes. APPLAUSE NK: Welcome back. CR: Thankyou, Nathan. Nice to be back. NK: I suppose the first question everybody would want me to ask you is - how does it feel to lose an election? LAUGHTER NK: Because the presidential election was...correct me if I'm wrong, the first one you had ever lost? CR: Apart from a few internal party ones, yes, that's right. NK: How did it feel, to sit there watching the returns on a Friday night and realising that you'd lost? CR: Well, on Friday night we didn't know who'd won. I went to bed at about...two am, maybe, and got up a few hours later and someone told me the projections were that it was over and that we'd lost. NK: How did it feel? Were you angry? Sad? CR: Sort of, but I mean it's the nature of the game. The more elections you contest the greater the chance is that you're going to lose one. And in a democracy we don't have the right to complain when we do lose elections. There can only be one President, after all! NK: You campaigned strongly against an elected Presidency. CR: Yes. NK: Do you think you were wrong? CR: I think I was right about what an elected Presidency has the potential to do. Four years ago I was arguing very strongly that an elected President could claim a mandate to govern and undermine the government of the day. I still believe that. NK: So why did you run? CR: It seemed like a good idea at the time. LAUGHTER CR: No, the truth is that I felt I needed to air some views. I thought there were things that needed to be done in this country that nobody was saying, nobody was doing. I didn't feel they would ever get done unless someone stood for a position where they would be able to advocate for them. And that was the theme of the campaign, after all, that I would be the President who used the office to lobby for people, rather than as a power in its own right. NK: If you'd been elected President, would you have been able to? Or would the power have been too tempting to not use? CR: There was one great lie being spun about the press during the election campaign, Nathan, and that lie was that I would be in direct opposition to the government. If you think about it for a second, you know that's not true. Yes, of course, I would be politically opposed and I would have represented the opposition party, but no President can survive if they directly block what a government does. It could...it would lead to absolute anarchy. Breakdown of government...it would be a catastrophe. No Governor does that, and no President with even half a brain would contemplate it. If I'd won the Presidency the dynamic would have been one of negotiation, of compromise, of dialogue. Not of confrontation - that would never have worked. NK: What do you think will happen now that Lois Daniels is President - someone who isn't from either of the two big parties? CR: That's a very interesting question, Nathan. I don't know. This is totally uncharted waters for Georgeland -we've never had this situation before. I suspect that we might be moving away from a two-party system and towards a three-party system. I would expect that if that were to occur the Alliance would become a powerful third party, smaller than the other two but with a great deal of influence - punching above their weight. NK: Is that a good or a bad thing? CR: Well, look, robust political debate is always a good thing. The danger is when we become so trapped by our own point-of-view that we start to become nasty about it. Idealogy is good. Debate is good. But dogmatic approaches to politics are doomed to failure. So I think if the Alliance ascends we may end up with a less confrontational political system. Whether that's good or bad I suppose depends on whether you stand to lose or gain from that. NK: Do you stand to lose or gain from that? CR: I would hope we would all gain from that. But I really don't know. NK: Let's talk about your most recent job, as Ambassador to the United Nations. Were you prepared for what the job entailed, do you think? CR: Can you be? The job is so complex, so challenging, so unpredictable that I don't think anybody could be prepared for it. Certainly I knew my way around the building, and I had a lot of contacts I could draw on, consult... NK: You knew where the toilets were. LAUGHTER CR: Exactly. Actually...I'll tell you a story about the toilets... LAUGHTER NK: Ooh, toilet humour! LAUGHTER CR: Toilet humour, exactly. About...three or four months after I got to the UN I got issued with a speeding fine, you probably all remember that, right? Basically I got behind the wheel of a car, a big, American, fast roadster thing which I was loaned by some friends of ours, and I got carried away. It was stupid of me and I deserved to be caught. But anyway, about a week after that I had a conference to go to with the delegates from some other countries and during the interval I popped into one of the bathrooms for...well, the sitting down one. LAUGHTER CR: So I went into a cubicle and I started to...well, do what you do...and... LAUGHTER CR: That's not the funny part! LAUGHTER CR: So I was sitting in the cubicle and I was...getting down to business...and I heard this voice from the other side of the wall, this American, New York voice. It shouted out "Hey, buddy, could you give me a hand?" LAUGHTER CR: And what do you do? So I said "Er...yeah?" and the voice said "They're out of paper. Would you mind lending me some of yours?" LAUGHTER CR: So of course you have to, so I slipped some under the partition, and there was a thanks. But then he kept talking. I swear this is true - he said "So what's your name, pal?" and I thought the voice sounded kind of familiar. So I said "Cam", and he said, "hey, what's that accent, is that like British?". And by now this is turning into a coffee conversation, you know, not something you have in a bathroom, so I just said "Georgeland" and I'm thinking 'Oh God, Oh God, make it stop!' LAUGHTER CR: So he says "How ya doin'. My name's Freddie." By now I was done, so I got up and I walked out of the cubicle and just as I did this guy walks out to. And I swear to God, it was the cop who pulled me over! LAUGHTER CR: He was there to visit his uncle, who worked in the building, and he looked at me and we shared this look, this sort of 'OH MY GOD' type moment. Then he slowly, slowly turned and backed out of the room. LAUGHTER CR: It was the weirdest thing. And when I told my wife about it on the phone that night, there was a long pause and then she just said "Well, did he wash his hands?" LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE NK: I'm glad you brought your wife up. She's obviously done well for herself in the last few years... CR: Extremely. NK: When she decided to enter politics, what was your reaction? CR: I was very supportive - or I hope I was very supportive. She came to me after I'd announced I was bowing out and she said "what do you think about the idea of me running for your seat?" and I said "I think you should do it if you want to." I've always been supportive of people putting their hands up and saying "I want to be involved". We need to have more conscientious people in politics. We need to have more intelligent and articulate people in politics. We need to have more idealists in politics. We definitely need to have more women in politics... APPLAUSE CR: ...so I very much supported her. NK: And she, in turn, supported you. CR: True. NK: During your presidential campaign. CR: Yes. But we made it clear we weren't going to be a duumverate - it wasn't a two-for-one deal. Deb has her own career to think about and it wouldn't be good for her to be seen as totally on my coattails, as it were. NK: So was it better for your wife's career that you lost? LAUGHTER CR: Maybe. LAUGHTER NK: Of course, while you were in New York your second child, Alexis, was born. CR: Yes indeed. NK: How difficult was it being away from your wife and your two long daughters for such a long period? CR: Oh, intensely difficult. Very, very rough, sometimes. I missed out on Alexis's first word. That was hard. NK: It must have been. CR: But, you know, we made it work. I'd phone home every day, fly home as often as I could, sometimes they'd come to me...we managed. But it was tough, and in that sense it was a relief when I finally came home. NK: You said you quit because you'd rather jump than be pushed. Are you that sure Luke Macaulay would have fired you? CR: Maybe not 'fired' as such. I mean, you know Luke and I are friends, right? We've been friends since university. NK: Right. CR: So I think it would have been a very hard decision for him to say "look, you're fired." I think they would have found a way to push me out. I think I'd suddenly have found the Foreign Minister showing up in New York a lot and doing my job for me. I think they'd have pressured me to resign. I didn't want to go through all that so I quit. NK: You have two daughters, as you mentioned, Phoebe and Alexis. CR: Yes. Phoebe is four now and Alexis is two. NK: When you look at your daughters who do you see? Do you see yourself or their mother? CR: Well, Alexis is her mother. No question. She looks like her, she has her eyes. I think Phoebe is me, though. NK: How so? CR: Oh, just little things. She's already learning how to be a politician. LAUGHTER CR: I'm serious. NK: How so? CR: Well...OK, we were at a restaurant in Santa Christina, right. This was a couple of months back, during the campaign. The four of us were eating, and Phoebe had a cup of juice in front of her, right? So at one point my mobile rings and I stand up and wander out with my security guy to answer it and I leave Deb alone with the kids. When I come back, Deb is apologising to a waiter who is mopping up the juice that Phoebe has spilled all over the table. And I ask, you know, 'what happened'? And Deb tells me she leant down to get something from her handpurse and when she got up, the juice was spilled over the table. So I said to Phoebe 'did you know over your juice' and she said 'No.' So I asked her 'well why is it spilt?' and, I swear this is true, she just looks at me...the honest, sincere look, and she said 'I knocked over the cup but not the juice.' LAUGHTER, APPLAUSE CR: And for the whole of the evening she tried to explain...and she's four, remember, she tried to convince us that even though she knocked the cup, she didn't spill the juice - that spilled itself, you see. LAUGHTER NK: You're raising a little politician, all right. CR: Oh, I wish it weren't the case, but it is! LAUGHTER NK: Would you like either of your kids to follow in your footsteps and go into politics? CR: Um...well... NK: Be honest! LAUGHTER CR: I'd like them to grow up understanding what politics means. I'd like them to be politically aware. I'd like them to have opinions - I don't care if they grow up to be rusted-on-Tories, so long as they can argue their beliefs with conviction and they stay true to what they believe in. If they want to run for office one day, of course, I'll be right behind them, but I care more that they learn to think about the world and what's best for than I do about which particular career they go into. NK: Good answer. You're forty-five now. Do you have another career in you? Can you go back to politics now, after all that's happened? CR: I don't know. I'm becoming increasingly aware that I'm getting into middle age, but I honestly can't say whether I'll go back to politics, go back to journalism, keep writing - I just don't know. Though I am working on a third book and I do have plans for a fourth, so... NK: Oh really? Do share. CR: Well, my first book was kind of a...memoir, I guess, and the second one was a manifesto-stroke-anecdotal memoir about university, mostly. The third book is about my time at the UN and as head of Rescue. It's a sort of combination memoir and guide to how international relations works. NK: Sounds intriguing. And the fourth? CR: The fourth is different, Nathan. I've decided to write a novel. NK: Really? CR: Yes. It's a political novel, based partly on real life but mostly on hypotheticals. I haven't written anything yet - I'm just jotting down ideas. But I'm really enjoying writing, so I imagine I'll stick with it for a while. NK: Is there a circumstance under which you'd consider returning to public office? CR: I honestly don't know. Maybe. If there's something I feel strongly enough about to produce a run for office, local, state, federal...then maybe. It's a big question, Nathan, and the answer is that I honestly don't have a clue what's around the next bend in life. Category:Individuals